'Balloon Venus (Magenta), ' 2008–12. (© Jeff Koons/Gagosian Gallery)

Jeff Koons’s two-gallery blowout, his first large-scale appearance in commercial galleries in the city in 10 years and the unrivaled event of the spring art season (barring, perhaps, the Frieze Art Fair), is a roaring success, filled with feats of engineering and artistic choices that are as gleefully peculiar and perverse as any he has ever made. Mr. Koons strives to please, and he delivers.

Both shows are mostly made up of fairly large to gargantuan sculptures. At Gagosian, a threatening, man-size Incredible Hulk pushes a wheelbarrow filled with real flowers, all of them in full bloom. The Hulk appears to be made of thin plastic—a cheap inflatable toy writ large—but in fact, in a signature Koons trompe l’oeil, it is an immaculate bronze cast. Huge new stainless steel balloon sculptures are characteristically grandiose and dripping with sexual innuendo: a red monkey with a phallically sloping tail, a blue swan with a twist of material that resembles a rectum, and a magenta Venus of Willendorf that was modeled on the circa 24,000 B.C. sculpture of that name and flaunts numerous voluptuous curves.

'Antiquity 3,' 2009–11. (© Jeff Koons/Gagosian Gallery)

Viewing these sculptures can be a queasy experience: even while reveling in Mr. Koons’s delirious visual splendor, one is confronted with the dubious values that undergird it. This is art about the relentless pursuit of perfection and control, seven-plus-figure luxury goods pitched to billionaires and realized with massive sums of capital and labor. They embody and promote a determined lust for accumulation—a drive for money, sex, fame and historical stature. These sculptures’ sheer audacity and expense are, inextricably, ingredients in their production.

And these new pieces are even more audacious and expensive-looking than past Koons efforts. Even his paintings, long his Achilles’ heel, stun. Meticulously painted by teams of assistants, they’re fantastical, flat collages of works by artists including Picasso and Louis Eilshemius, as well as anonymous abstractions and photographs of ancient statuary, 1950s fetish pinup Bettie Page and various inflatable toys. Each has a cartoon sketch on top that resembles both a sailboat and a vagina. By the logic of that second image, and Mr. Koons’s flair for sexual imagery in general, viewers’ eyes penetrate the image, plunging into his strange elixirs of art history and sensuality.

Detail of 'Gazing Ball (Ariadne),' 2013. (© Jeff Koons/David Zwirner)

The pieces at Zwirner are comparatively austere white plaster sculptures modeled on ancient art (a reclining lady, a hulking nude man) and quotidian American culture (a long row of mailboxes, a birdbath), each with a reflective royal blue gazing ball perched on some part of it. The reflective balls, familiar from prototypical American front yards, take in and reflect the entire gallery. Mr. Koons’s best work tends to be his most ostentatious, his priciest, so these (relatively) modest pieces seem to run the risk of being consigned to the status of minor side projects. (Mr. Koons’s museum-filling Whitney Museum exhibition is scheduled to open next year, and the question of what will or won’t make the cut plays around these two shows.) But that would be a mistake, since they seem to evince a newfound interest in process (plaster often being used to make copies of sculptures or as an intermediary material in their creation) and experimentation (some are damaged in sections or missing limbs, though they are otherwise smooth).

'Metallic Venus,' 2010–12. (© Jeff Koons/Gagosian Gallery)

Another intriguing outlier is a turquoise sculpture at Gagosian based on the ancient Greco-Roman Callipygian Venus—the Venus of the beautiful buttocks. It has an exaggeratedly smooth shape in some sections—note the toeless feet—that create warped reflections. If it weren’t for the real white flowers sitting in a vase alongside the Venus, she could be mistaken for a digital apparition. That strange sheen makes her look thrillingly unstable, as if she could vanish into the ether at any moment, caught up in the currents of money and speculation that flow through Mr. Koons’s oeuvre and that are ultimately so essential to it.

For decades, Mr. Koons’s work has looked alluring and only vaguely sinister. Just a few years ago, some wondered if his decadence would weather the recession. Now we have our answer. His work is stronger than ever, and so is the nimbus of darkness around these saccharine daydreams. “I’m always very upset if somebody doesn’t like my work,” Mr. Koons has said, “because I never want to lose anyone.” We’re certainly all still watching.

(Through June 29, 2013)

Installation view. (Courtesy David Zwirner)

Take Richard Serra’s 1967 artwork Verb List, a piece consisting of 108 terms handwritten across four columns on two sheets of letter paper. It’s a kind of index to the 18 titanic formal experiments, borrowed from museums and private collections all over the world, that have been arranged to loosely recreate the feeling of the artist’s 1968 Soho loft inside David Zwirner’s distractingly opulent new building on West 20th Street. Begin with “to roll.” Scavenge an irregular, four-foot-high ingot of black rubber, scraped or torn into a sandy latex color along one corner. Lean it against the wall. The way it lists to the right brings to mind a dancer striking a supple pose, whose shape looks transitional even as it holds steady—a perfect sculptural embodiment of frozen gesture. But then the soft material reminds you that the piece, Chunk (1967) really is bending the way it looks like it’s bending, even though it’s bending too slowly to see.

Jump to Verb List’s second column and pick out “to support.” Set an eight-foot-long roll of sheet lead on the floor and lean it into a five-foot-square lead plate against the wall. Notice how the bottom edge of the roll flattens under its own weight: this one is called Prop (1968). But a monumental aesthetic—and even Chunk seems to create its own horizon simply in order to fill it—is no match for a subtle conception. Two hanging rubber wall pieces, one folded and tan like a hide, the other more geometric, continue the sense of delicate operations carried out by giant hands. And even Verb List is hardly as literal as it looks. After “to roll” comes “to crease” and “to fold,” and so on, in neat cursive, with a thick graphite line. But a full two dozen of these terms begin with “of” rather than “to”—as in “of entropy,” “of layering,” or “of electromagnetic”—and few of the verbs are as concrete as “to crease.” Given a roll of sheet lead, how do you “dapple,” “flood” or “complement” it?

'Tearing Lead From 1.00 to 1.47' (1968) by Serra. (Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner)

In the next room, this apparent mystery is stripped away to reveal the mystery underneath. One Ton Prop (House of Cards) (1969) consists of four inch-thick, four-foot-square lead plates, streaked and stained. Balanced on edge around a slightly larger square, they fall in against one another, propped corner to corner in a rough open cube. This arrangement, despite its enormous potential energy, is as contingent as a soap bubble: it’s only one of an infinite number of possible ways to arrange four lead plates, and if a plate slipped or fell, the object called One Ton Prop would instantly cease to exist. Triangles of light from the gaps at the bottom pierce through a spiral of quadrilateral shadows.

Strike: To Roberta and Rudy (1969-71) is an eight-foot-high wall of steel jammed into the gallery’s back corner. While One Ton Prop’s repetition makes its components into generic units, blasting away their color and detail, Strike elevates its pattern of orange rust into a universal particular that defies generalization; the choice of its arrangement seems not like the faint, hazardous breath of mortality but singular and necessary. In part, this is as simple as the difference between looking down and looking up, or between walking around and back and forth—the fact that you can’t see both sides of Strike at once gives it a presence that the smaller prop pieces can’t have. But it’s also the difference between diving down to find bottom and then, having found it, using the bottom to spring back up.

(Through June 15, 2013)

Born in Leipzig, Germany, as Peter Schwarze, Palermo was adopted and grew up as Peter Heisterkamp, picking up his nickname at 21 when a fellow student in Düsseldorf under the spell of the messianic German artist Joseph Beuys noted his resemblance to the crooked American boxing promoter Blinky Palermo. Zwirner’s press materials emphasize the point (new to me) that Palermo officially adopted only the surname. That he was actually a one-namer like Prince and Madonna is fitting. He was the visual-art equivalent of a rock star. Palermo’s early geometric abstractions, monochromatic shaped canvases and fabric works—just a few pieces of industrial colored textiles sewn into irresistible paintings—display a preternatural sense for the poetics of color and shape, which reached full flower in late sets of brilliantly colored paintings on thin steel.

Zwirner has a felt-tip study for Palermo’s masterpiece in that last style, a 15-part work in Dia’s collection called To the People of New York City (1976), which he spent the last full year of his life completing. The sketch maps out its 40 paintings, each with various rectangular permutations of the colors of the German flag—gold, red, black. It has the look of conceptual art, but its pieces never actually fit a formula. That’s classic Palermo: adopting rules or styles only to tweak or slip outside of them. He’s not quite a minimalist or a conceptual artist or even a process painter à la Robert Ryman. I like to think of him as the wily kid brother of the sometimes self-serious Ellsworth Kelly. (He was two days shy of being exactly two decades younger.)

Most of these late drawings are no more than an acrylic shape or two on white paper that Palermo tore from a scrapbook and affixed to cardboard. A 1976 piece dedicated to his fellow German and onetime studio-mate Imi Knoebel has three sheets, each with barely there scratchy black marks that could be letters: T, I, X. There’s a bewitching suite of 12 drawings that has as its theme the months of the year, and some four-panel works dealing with hours of the day. 1-7 Untitled (for Babette) (1976) is seven sheets marked with blocks of red, each handled differently, with a wetter or drier, scratchier brush, a curving or straight line. Color almost always hugs a side or corner in Palermo’s drawings so that it seems to be entering from outside the frame.

Does all of this sound a touch precious? Don’t worry. With a little time, odd details—drips, a tear, the shocking luminosity of the hazy yellow in the drawing for the month of March—will catch you. A Kabbalistic colorist, Palermo was a master of casual but dignified strangeness, trafficking in subtle, oblique but very real offerings of levity, sadness, affection.

Palermo lived in New York from 1973 to 1976, and apparently loved the city. He’s left us a complicated portrait of Delancey Street, six tangles of black and yellow acrylic with graphite, and also a work called Manhattan (1976–77), the last painting he completed before his death. Two square sheets of steel, it’s painted from left to right with a luminous orange rectangle, a black square that spans its panels and a teal rectangle. White lines separating those colors give it the look of a Barnett Newman, and in a particular light, one might even see red, white and blue. Of course, Palermo’s art eludes nationalist classifications as easily as it does art-historical ones. No matter. For the next two months, he’s ours. (Through June 29, 2013)

Serra at MoMA. (Courtesy Patrick McMullan)

Last week members of the press assembled at David Zwirner's new space on West 20th Street for a preview of Richard Serra's early works there and, we'd been told, a walkthrough of the exhibition with the artist himself. If you were familiar with Mr. Serra's personality—or at least his famous falling out with the U.S. government over its decision to remove his sculpture Tilted Arc (1981) in 1989—the walkthrough sounded slightly out of character. Even if he had curated the show himself, Mr. Serra is not a salesman of any kind. He's not even especially friendly. As the hacks shuffled around near the formal and material experimentations from 1966 to 1971 that comprise the show (coiled lead, etc.), the squat bald artist spoke to no one except the man whose name was on the door. And to him he spoke gruffly.

So on some kind of a cue Mr. Zwirner told us that instead of a walkthrough we'd be doing a Q&A session with the artist upstairs, in the gallery's shiny new kitchen. We piled into the small elevator in groups and once we'd been assembled, Mr. Serra sat on a windowsill and handled us like a college class that hadn't done the reading. It was great.

"One of the reasons I got involved in art was that I wanted an alternative life," he said, of how his fascination with Transcendentalism led him here today. "I wanted to study my own sensations."

It all began for him, he said, when he was traveling around Europe on a Fulbright scholarship with Philip Glass. At the time he'd wanted to be a painter, but then he saw Las Meninas (1656) by Diego Velázquez at the Prado museum in Madrid and it was all over. "Velázquez made it so that the object was subject to change when I stood there. I was an extension of that space, and I didn't see how I was going to be able to do that in a painting unless I resorted to a mirror."

He and Mr. Glass used to see Alberto Giacometti wandering around Paris and the idea of sculpture hit him. He was "the existential guy in the studio screwing around with clay every day, throwing it away and then he'd come out with plaster stuck in his hair." Why not sculpture?

The two returned to New York.

"With Phil and help from some other people," he said, "we got a ton of lead up to my place on the sixth floor on Greenwich Street and we set up The House of Cards (1969). There are no fixed joints and at that time it didn't look like sculpture, it didn't look like anything. I was married then and my wife [Nancy Graves] came home. She was also a sculptor and she looked at it and said, 'You can't show that.' And I said, 'Well why is that?' and she said, 'Because that's not art and it's dangerous and you're going to hurt somebody and you're up to no good, stop smoking dope,' or whatever she said. And I said, 'Look: I am going to show it.' And we got divorced."

He wasn't looking to win friends. "For the group of people I was involved with, if somebody came into Max's Kansas City with a white suit on and shiny shoes and said, 'I just sold out my show!' we thought, 'Oh, fuck,'" he said, exasperated, like "check out this asshole." "Because obviously that meant there are collectors who know what this work is about, so it can't be any good."

"What about your collectors?" asked some smartass at the table.

"I didn't have any!" he said. One of the works in this show, he said, was sold to a museum with three others for $800.

Someone asked him to recall his sentiments about Tilted Arc. "It pissed me off," he said.

Shortly after that, almost exactly 30 minutes into the session, he clapped his hands and said, "I think that's a wrap." And then it was.

Thomas Ruff, '3D-ma.r.s.09,' 2013. (Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner)

Could it be an art world trend occasioned by the special effects of films like Avatar and The Avengers? A few months ago, rising star Trisha Baga had visitors at Greene Naftali don 3D glasses to better experience her complex installations and slide projections. Last fall, Christie’s made the somewhat tenuous claim that Warhol’s 1962 “3D painting” of the Statue of Liberty was meant to be viewed through 3D glasses, and it dutifully doled them out to prospective buyers and looky-loos alike. Now, at David Zwirner, 3D glasses are provided for viewing superstar German photographer Thomas Ruff’s recent “ma.r.s.” series. Grab a pair from the box near the entrance and enjoy the aerial views of the red planet, originally captured by NASA. In 3D-ma.r.s. 10 (2013), the planet’s carbuncular surface seems to pop right into the gallery. Move around it and the irregular bumps shift and stretch, appearing to follow you. Put the glasses on backward to reverse what recedes and what protrudes—the enormous crater dominating 3D-ma.r.s.09 (2013) will stick out like a Bundt cake.

Despite its recent popularity, 3D is not a particularly new gimmick. Google it and you’ll encounter those classic 1950s photos of theaters full of enraptured, goggle-eyed moviegoers. That at this point 3D is, by the breakneck standards of technological change, an old technology may be the subtle point Mr. Ruff is making by showing the “ma.r.s.” series alongside his new so-called “photograms,” though these large works were not made the old-fashioned way like those of Man Ray, Moholy-Nagy and other intrepid Modernists. Instead of placing objects on photosensitive paper and exposing the arrangement to light, Mr. Ruff used a “virtual darkroom,” custom software that allowed him to create and move shapes, and add and adjust color. “When I first had the wish ... to try photograms,” he said during a recent press walk through the exhibition, “I very soon realized that it’s very complicated.” The darkroom allows for chance; a computer program facilitates control.

Mr. Ruff’s use of an anachronistic title for a technologically innovative series—these “photograms” could never have been made in a physical darkroom—contrasts with previous bodies of work that embrace their new media origins, like his “jpegs”: dramatically enlarged and printed Internet thumbnails, or his “Night” series, the very technology of which (infrared night vision) contained his commentary on the Gulf War. The title, however, does not detract from their visual pleasure. These dynamic abstract images would be well suited to a futuristic concert hall, as their forms glint and gleam like parts plucked from brass instruments: what could be the keys of a saxophone and the bell of a horn appear to collide with cymbals spinning off into space. The strongest works, such as phg.01 and r.phg.s02 (both 2012), are like music itself—the clangs and clashes of a crescendo take the form of sharp-edged shapes, and slow, mournful solos manifest in the velvety shadows.

Partial installation view of 'Torwand (Red) / Torwand (Blue),' 2004. (Courtesy David Zwirner)

It’s the rare deconstruction that remembers to deconstruct itself. But you can see how it works in Alan Uglow’s 2010 T-3. (The English-born painter died in 2011.) On a flat, bright-white field, picture a figure like a cross with red, silver and black bars, the upper and lower two slightly offset to create a cantilevered feeling of expansive stillness. Borders are exact—the white field, if you look closely, is divided by sharp edges of paint into four symmetrical pieces—but the bars of the figure remain thick enough to have their own substance. A subversion of the inhuman infinitudes of geometry is at the same time an expression of faith in their real meaning.

In Standard #8 (Blue), the white canvas is bordered by four blue lines and divided by another, like a window sash, across the middle. Two off-white shadow lines divide each of the resulting halves in half; four blue notches project into the four outside corners, and four shadow notches into the middle four; and the canvas sits on two small wooden blocks. Blue-on-white, white-on-white and three-dimensional wooden stripes are thus all set on par, making for a small humanist joke with enormous ramifications. By reducing the separate pretensions of its own given terms, the painting makes itself open-ended, and therefore actually, if quietly, universal.

Portrait of a Standard (Blue), a monochromatic screen-printed photograph of Standard #8 set at an angle, continues the joke, turning negative positive and side to front: the white edge of the canvas is as brightly distinct as the painted stripe it separates from a printed shadow. The flat trapezoid of the tilted canvas suggests that imperfection—or even motion, if you read the tipped-forward parallelogram crossbar of T-3 as a rectangle going somewhere—is only a trick of perspective. It’s an optimistic philosophy. If it doesn’t really alter what it seems to alter, an alteration must be an addition. (Through March 23, 2013)

Kusama in 1968. (Keystone Features/Getty Images)

Yayoi Kusama will join David Zwirner, The New York Times' Carol Vogel writes. Shortly after Art Basel Miami Beach last year, The Art Newspaper reported that she was parting ways with Gagosian Gallery. She had her first one-person show with the gallery in 2009. A recent profile of Mr. Gagosian in New York magazine said that a representative for the artist told the gallery last summer that she wanted to cease working together. In late December, the German newspaper Die Welt reported the widely circulating rumor that Ms. Kusama was set to join Zwirner in New York. And now the official word has arrived.

The news comes shortly after Jeff Koons said that he would do a show with Zwirner in New York, though he has also said that he will continue to work with Gagosian and Sonnabend Gallery.

Ms. Vogel confirms that Ms. Kusama will continue to work with Victoria Miro in London, where Zwirner recently opened a space.

The excitement never ends in Chelsea.

The film opens with long shots of dun-colored Kabul. Young boys play in the hills of the city as a black military helicopter cruises overhead. One boy frames it in a rectangle with his fingers as though he is shooting a film. In the one scene, a group of boys examine strips of film. “All these people are locked up,” one says. For most of the film, two boys are off and running, pushing along two metal film reels—one red, one blue—along the area’s rough dirt roads, leaving long trails of film behind them as they go.

Many of Mr. Alÿs’s past performances and videos are marked by smug poeticism (2002’s When Faith Moves Mountains, in which 500 shovel-wielding volunteers attempt to move a sand dune 10 centimeters) or milquetoast boundary-testing (1996’s Narcotourism, in which he wandered Copenhagen for a week, after dropping a different drug each day). And at first, Reel-Unreel reads as facile allegory—children in a battered nation pushing film haphazardly through their streets as a metaphor for the imperfect, improvisational way in which succeeding generations will write their histories.

But watch for a while, reclining on the thin mattresses on Zwirner’s floor, and the absolute joyfulness of the film may convert you, as it did me. The kids, who take turns wielding the reels, are loving every bit of the challenge, learning to guide those wheels expertly with their hands, down craggily cement streets, around passing vans and even through fires. The symbolism throughout may not be subtle, but the action is thrilling.

In an adjoining room of the show are several of Mr. Alÿs’s small paintings, which critic Peter Schjeldahl once hilariously declared “fey to the max.” (“You would be ashamed of disparaging them, as you would of kicking a kitten,” he wrote on the occasion of the artist’s 2011 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1.) These new works—characteristically slight in terms of technique, though not content—show scenes from Afghanistan (children, soldiers, wandering packs of dogs) alongside rectangular blocks of color sourced from television test signals. They’re blank markers of the artist’s inability to depict in painting the violence of the nation, he has said.

A prose poem in a third room, also hung with a handful of test-pattern paintings, is Mr. Alÿs reflecting on the role of the artist in times of war—“1943, / I think about Morandi painting on top of a hill surrounded by fascism, / I think about Picabia finding inspiration in soft porn magazines on the Côte d’Azur”—and it provides a clue as to what he’s up to here, namely, mulling, with admirable nuance, what his role should be as a globe-trotting artist who has alighted in an area of intense, and very foreign, multigenerational conflict.

Specific stories, he seems to have concluded, are not his to tell. Taking a refreshing step to the side from his frequent role as protagonist in his films, he lets the boys be the stars and lead the action. At the moment, almost half of Afghanistan’s population is under 15 years old. Children like those who appear in the film will be responsible for filling in those abstract test-screen patterns that he has left on his canvases. And then there is the matter of the girls, who are nowhere to be seen. (Through Feb. 9, 2013)

A Kusama display and wax figure at a Louis Vuitton store in Hong Kong. (Philippe Lopez/AFP/Getty Images)

Last year was a wild one for relations between artists and their galleries. Numerous burgeoning talents signed up with major New York dealers; meanwhile, a handful of established relationships came to abrupt ends, with star players switching teams. There’s no sign things will slow down in 2013, with news of signings of closely watched emerging artists and a rumor that one more major arrangement is in the works.

The big question at the moment is where the artists who left Gagosian at the end of 2012, Damien Hirst and Yayoi Kusama, will end up, in terms of a New York representative. In late December, the German newspaper Die Welt reported that Ms. Kusama is rumored to be in talks to join the David Zwirner gallery, which just opened a space in London and has another space in the works on 20th Street in Chelsea, a block north of its already-massive 19th Street galleries. The rumor about Ms. Kusama, who is renowned for her polka-dotted works, has been making the rounds in New York art circles, though Zwirner’s reps have declined to comment.

If Ms. Kusama makes the move to Zwirner, she may find some familiar company over there. Jeff Koons, who has long shown with Gagosian and Sonnabend, announced in early December that he would do a show there this year. As if Zwirner wasn’t having a good enough start to 2013, Russian art patron Maria Baibakova told the Nowness website, as part of her New Year’s predictions, that she thinks Zwirner “will overcome Larry Gagosian as the number one gallerist in the world” in 2013.

Singh, 'Assembly Instructions (The Pledge- Danny Rubin),' 2012. (Courtesy the artist, Metro Pictures, Art:Concept, Monitor Gallery, Sprüth Magers)

In other news, Chelsea’s Metro Pictures gallery has picked up the Bordeaux, France-born, New York-based artist Alexandre Singh, who opens a new show, “The Pledge,” at the Drawing Center on Jan. 17. Though he’s shown widely in Europe, this will be his debut museum exhibition in North America, and his first show in New York since his 2009 gallery debut in the city at Harris Lieberman. Known for slyly comic collages, inspired most recently by interviews that he conducts with people from various disciplines (artists, scientists, filmmakers), Mr. Singh is currently in residency at the Witte de With arts center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, developing a theater piece called The Humans that will hit the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the fall.

Installation view of Kydd's 2012 video 'Composition Warner Studio.' (Courtesy the artist and Nicelle Beauchene Gallery)

Down on the Lower East Side, Nicelle Beauchene, freshly installed in a new two-story Broome Street gallery that she shares with Jack Hanley (they trade floors with each new show) has begun working with the Los Angeles-based video artist Owen Kydd, who makes short, sometimes subtly manipulated, single-shot digital films that resemble photographic still lifes. Ms. Beauchene, who shows emerging artists like painter Sarah Crowner and the photographer and critic Chris Wiley (who introduced her to Mr. Kydd’s work), opens a show with her new signee on Jan. 25.

As Lower East Side and Chelsea galleries continue to expand, there’s no doubt there will be many more new signings to come.

A still from 'REEL-UNREEL.' (Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner)

When Hurricane Sandy hit earlier this year, it delayed the opening of a Francis Alÿs show at David Zwirner. Thankfully, the gallery has repaired the space, and will present his work on Jan. 10. In this week's New Yorker, Julie Belcove wanders around Manhattan with Mr. Alÿs as he looks for his doppelgänger. (Sort of a confusing thing: best to just read the story.) In the piece, the artist talks a bit about the strange, small paintings that he made in Afghanistan recently. Some were presented at Documenta 13 this summer in Kassel, Germany, and were at Zwirner when it flooded during the hurricane.

From the story:

Alÿs's paintings from Afghanistan, which will be on view at Zwirner along with "REEL-UNREEL," are marked by wide bright stripes, evoking TV test patterns, partly obscuring realistic scenes of daily life. He said that he had had a hard time processing what he experienced there, and the color bars provided some distance. "I needed to step out of it," he said. "I cannot paint violence." The paintings were laid out on two long tables in the gallery when Hurricane Sandy hit. The tables floated through the flooded gallery, landing in another room when the water receded. The art was unharmed. "Quite unbelievable!" Alÿs said. "I can only imagine that, if they made it through Afghanistan, they had to make it through the storm."

The show, which includes the paintings and a film, REEL-UNREEL, runs through Feb. 9.